Our fren Rogal jotted down some thoughts and opinions for us. Media and Marketing companies use passion, positive or negative, to drive sales or views. The synopsis is: be sure you’re doing or buying what you wan
Anti-Anything Rogal Dorn @IamR0galD0rn
A 🧵:
I want to talk briefly about the Bud Light thing going on. But firstly, I want to establish a couple of things for consistency’s sake.
I work in marketing. I am not the god of marketing, and I am not the giga-tier super brain professor X of marketing. Nor am I the CEO of
some major corporation, or even giga-tier corporation. Obviously, I wouldn’t be anon on twitter.
I work in something more or less called ‘direct marketing’ which is closer to sales. It’s my job to take marketing materials and strategies produced and tailor them to specific
demographics and ‘force’ them to work while also providing feedback on the strategies. ‘Yeah, I made it work, but it was twice as hard as the last one, try focusing on __ instead’.
I’ve talked before about how the giga-corps and brands have weaponized hate and I often tailor it
to the individual reading it at the moment, when I probably shouldn’t have. I should have made it more obvious what the goal is.
Brands, especially media brands, have weaponized hate. But not just yours, the hatred of people who disagree with you in things. Disney and Amazon are
excellent examples of this. The ‘Rings of Power’ debacle… There can be no objective discussion on the story, quality of acting, or production in general without hate becoming involved. And even if you find two people of differing opinions willing to have that discussion on some
youtube video or *shudders* ‘podcast’, the reality is that other people will then bring hate into the commentary of THAT media that is produced.
This means that even for a low-effort and obviously weaponized show like ‘tRoP’ the media giant gets nearly infinite free
marketing and advertising across 100s, if not 1,000s, of platforms from other people. YOUR twitter account is a platform, and the super-left-wing-feminist who just LOVES ‘tRoP’ is also a platform. If you talk about how much you hate it and the feminist screams back at you how
amazing it is, it generates a conversation. They gain relevance for free, with next to no effort. I’m sure if you think about it you can find 100s of examples of this in major media.
But now let’s talk about another form of weaponized marketing: loyalty.
Yes, dear reader, your
brand loyalty has been weaponized. See, before the day of Mad Men style advertising the brands and companies had to be loyal to their customers and customer base. I’m sure some of you remember that even in the 80s and 90s you had brands like Bud and Miller realizing the majority
of their drinkers were single men, 21-50, and those dudes like sports and beer and cheeseburgers and camping and stuff. ‘Man’s man’ stuff. So they made advertising that reinforced that their brand was about being *your* brand.
Now, can any of you remember a time when maybe you
found out your buddy drank Miller Lite rather than Bud Light? ‘wtf were they all out of beer so you had to make due with water, lolololol’
That is what the brands started to notice as well. Not just beer, but lots of other things. There are more examples to go through, but since
drinking is one of the most common social activities it was one of the most common to have those interactions.
Over time, a decade or more, brands realized that they didn’t need to convince you to be loyal to them anymore, they had your loyalty. What they needed to do was
reinforce that loyalty.
Now we all know someone who’s panties got in a serious bunch when Bud Light started to launch things like Bud Light Lime and other stuff. But did they stop drinking Bud Light? Nope, after all, no big deal.
THAT is the brand ‘testing the waters’. I do the
same thing sometimes even in my lower-level marketing job. Sometimes I tell a guest no to see if it challenges their loyalty to the brand (not JUST because, but it is a factor). After YEARS of positive interactions, they are less likely to give an overtly negative response to the
negative.
So Bud Light and other brands, not just beer, have been working hard over the last 20 years to still give you the exact same product, while also changing the brand subtly.
Now we’re in the age where you can have a far-right-wing completely anti-LGBTQ person who will
see two men kissing in a Bud Light commercial and still walk into his corner store and pick up a 24 hour pack before he starts changing the oil on his 97′ Chevy 1500 oil change.
What does this mean? It means the loyalty flip is complete. I’m not saying Bud Light was the brand of
people who are anti-gay or LGB or anything. I’m saying it was the beer of that guy. They marketed to him because he liked their beer and they wanted his business. But now, they know that no matter what they do he will always buy their beer. They can do whatever they want in terms
of marketing and advertising. They can sell him beer just by existing, and then laser-focus their advertising and marketing on getting new customers they had never advertised before.
And now, even if Oil Change ultra-conservative dude puts up ‘a fight’ and raises his concerns it
actually helps sell more beer. The people Bud Light is attempting to market to will see how much it upsets that guy having ‘his’ beer get ‘taken over’ and then start buying it and drinking it out of spite. Then THEY are building their own brand loyalty out of spite and hate. Then
comes the critical choice… Does ultra-con man stop drinking his favorite beer of all time and go to ‘the enemy beer’? What does he tell the fellas when they are all drinking bud and he walks in with a miller? Or he has to start drinking Miller like all his friends after giving
them crap for drinking Miller and not Bud. Meanwhile, Bud Light brand gets more recognition and more customers with barely any loss in the exchange.
This is the overlap of ‘hate’ marketing. The brand-loyalty and hate marketing is both evil and brilliant.
I’m honestly still not
sure if Bud Light is going to go ‘lol pranked’ at the end of all of this, or if Dylan isn’t pulling some 4D chess move to force a corporate sponsor. His act is that deep and hilarious that you can never be sure. Tbh I feel he has full control over his own brand and the
controversy he can create the moment he makes a video makes him a marketing genius, and a marketing department’s DREAM. All you have to do to get shit-loads of free advertising is put a product in Dylan’s hands. It is amazing.
Think of it like ‘makeup influencers’ on youtube and
instagram. Lots of money being able to ‘recommend’ a new eye-shadow in a 2 minute video. Dylan has combined hate-marketing with anti-loyalty marketing.
The best part is, cognitively, there is next to nothing you can do about this. Even if the partnership with Dylan upsets you to
the core of your being, there is still a 90% chance that if you are a Bud Light drinker that AB InBev knows that when you get a thirst, you are going to stroll over to that cooler and grab a nice blue can pack and stroll up to slap money down.
They have you. So what are the
available responses?
1) Don’t give a fuck and stop engaging with hate marketing. Buy what you want to buy and ignore the ‘viral’ marketing attempts. They *might* have to deploy new strats.
2) If you boycott, stick to it. Do not break down.
Those are it. That’s all you got.
